Person of the Year (Part 3)

Our previous two Rum and Monkey Individuals of the Year have been William H. Gates III and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Following these two amazingly talented and morally upstanding men, we have decided to place a clearly mentally unstable alleged paedophile. Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Jackson is the third of our five award recipients, even as his mattress undergoes DNA testing.

Ignore the way his hit song The Way You Make Me Feel makes you feel now you've heard the kiddie-fiddling allegations. This is trial by media, and for all we know the nutcase albino songstress is innocent; sure, he keeps a briefcase full of porn in his room, but so do we all, right? The fact that he writes his songs "up his wishing tree" is to be taken entirely at face value, and is in no way a euphemism of any kind.

Consider this. We worship our celebrities like they're the second coming and then act all surprised when they turn around and turn into the crazy monster's even crazier friend (the one they don't like to bring to parties). In the context of Hollywood, lunacy is understandable.

The fact is, we love him because he no longer likes Uri Geller. Geller, you'll recall, is a similarly nutcase Israeli man who bends spoons with his mind and travels the world sampling its olive oil. It was he who Jackson entrusted to find a nice man to interview him; said man turned out to be Martin Bashir, a cut-throat tabloid television journalist, who probably paid Uri for the privilege. It would seem that more than just spoons have been bent, and more than just olives are oily.

But that's okay - Jackson stood defiant. He defiantly released a documentary that made him seem even crazier; he defiantly dangled a baby over his balcony window to astonished onlookers below. The world's media was appalled, but what's more rock and roll than sending an actual baby plummeting down to earth like a blubbery water balloon? Rock and roll, man!

And it's equally understandable that Mikey would want to claim that his album didn't do well due to racism. That makes sense. It was, after all, a work of divine genius, comparable only to Pink Floyd's The Wall and the Beatles' seminal White Album. To sell only two million copies smacked of industrial sabotage; I suspect the Justin Timberlake boys.

In summation: a plastic surgery addict with a porn addiction, an alleged affiliation with the Nation of Islam, a handful of children who are very likely going to gnaw their own feet off and change their names to Nipple by the age of thirteen, a smattering of lunatic friends and persistent charges of indecent childminding? Long live the cult of celebrity! It's been a good year.

Tomorrow: creative mustard sculpture and how it relates to modern Christianity.